Twenty years ago, I described them as “post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights.” In more recent times, I’ve asserted that the South can’t begin to move forward until they’re dead. It seems awfully uncharitable to talk that way about my grandparents – and my parents – but there it is.
Non-urban, mostly Southern, the kind of voters who tipped for Wallace in 1968 and abandoned the Democrats nationally by 1980, these are the people who want the government out of their lives and away from their Medicare and Social Security. They occupy a conservative-populist space that’s made millionaires of countless AM radio hosts, a fundamentalist pre-Enlightenment space that doesn’t have room for science, logic, reason, or fancy book-larnin’. The phrase “common sense” comes up a lot – it’s all gut instinct and what they already believe. And it’s a worldview that is essentially and utterly incompatible with 21st century modernity.
This is why things have gotten so bad – these are literally their Last Days. They will fight to the death for their worldview – this is a matter of God and country and what they know to be right, so there’s no room for negotiation or compromise or “come let us reason together.” And there are elements that are more than happy to harness that rage and desperation to their own ends – with precious little regard for what the endgame looks like.
So how do you prepare for a situation where you can’t make a deal? At all? Ever? Your options are twofold at that point, whether it’s Afghanistan or Alabama:
1) Containment
2) Elimination
Take it as read that 2) is impossible. You’ll never kill every last Taliban or Al-Qaeda, and even if you could, there are always others willing to take their place. All you can do is whatever it takes to minimize the risk that they can get at you.
But then there’s Alabama. What was Reconstruction, if not a decade-long attempt at containment?